Duo In Carne Una
by The Black Sluggard
Summary: Months after the revelations which challenged everything he knew about his partner—and in the face of his looming wedding—Kevin makes his choice. Slash, Ryan/Esposito. (Sequel to "Sui Generis". Warnings for dubious consent.)


"..._and they shall be one flesh._"

"Kevin?"

Jenny was pounding on the door of the restroom, calling his name. She had been for several minutes already, and her voice was becoming more and more panicked with each one that passed. Kevin didn't answer her. He was far too occupied trying to get his breathing under control, and he probably couldn't have answered if he wanted to.

God...Kevin didn't even _know_ if he wanted to.

The panic attacks were a recent development. Kevin had never had them before... Before what had happened to him. They didn't happen often, and most of the attacks he had experienced had been nowhere near as severe as the one that had hit him moments ago. At worst they left him shaken and disoriented, but normally they cleared up quickly as soon as he managed to steal a few moments alone—_usually_, he did not completely lose it and wind up locking himself inside the mensroom of his church.

But, then, under normal circumstances—or what deigned to pass for normal circumstances anymore—the panic attacks usually happened around Javier.

It might even have been fair to say that the attacks happened _because_ of Javier—technically, it would have been true, on multiple levels. Yet, somehow, Kevin never seemed able to think of it that way. He had actually tried, knowing full well that Javier would have let him get away with it...but then, Kevin was sure his partner already blamed the attacks on himself. In any case, though the attacks were a consequence of his partner's actions, Javier wasn't really the _cause_ of them, not directly. It was Javier's presence that instigated them rather than anything his partner did, but Javier couldn't help that. And Javier had done his best to help avoid the type of situations that were known to set him off—had even offered, in the beginning, to transfer to another station.

Kevin had been the one to refuse.

It would have been a brutal understatement to say that adjusting to life after...what had happened to him had been difficult. Still, Kevin _was_ adjusting, and he was proud of that. Every day he managed to set foot out of his apartment and give the impression of being a semi-functional human being felt like a victory.

The gloves helped. It was actually a little embarrassing, but the gloves had helped a _lot_. Some over-taxed portion of his lizard brain still seemed to expend an exhaustive amount of effort in keeping track of Javier's whereabouts at all times, but when they were together it was a relief not having to worry about where he was putting his hands. It certainly made it a lot easier to focus on his job. And, more and more often, Kevin had found he could sit in close proximity to his partner—at their desks, in the car together, even out drinking with the others now and then—and manage to relax just a little.

Having even that much security was such a comfort that Kevin couldn't have _forced_ himself to care about the odd looks he got from time to time.

Cops in general were a nosy breed, and they tended to notice when one of their own began acting strange. His long illness and his partner's concurrent absence had been suspicious on their own, and Kevin knew the changes in his behavior stood out. The thin black gloves he had taken to wearing near-constantly when he was at the station simply made for a striking visual reminder that something wasn't quite right.

They probably should have been miserable to wear once the weather got warm, but Kevin seemed to be a lot more comfortable in the heat these days. Javier always had been, but Kevin, like most others, had always assumed his partner was simply better acclimated to it from his time spent deployed in the desert. Kevin knew now that hadn't quite been the case.

Though, in a way, that explanation was still so true it wasn't even funny.

What was kind of funny, though, when Kevin allowed himself to think about it, was how easily just a few small details could alter people's reactions to him. He remembered one recent interview in which the suspect hadn't been able to stop staring at his gloves. The unseasonably brutal heat that day had been entirely unexpected and Kevin had been too busy to notice the way it had effected everyone else, at least not right away. So Kevin had, quite obliviously, gone through his day, through the pursuit and the arrest, and sat down at the table wearing his jacket and his vest, and his usual pair of black leather gloves...

He had wound up securing a confession in less than half the time they had expected the interview to last.

Between the panic attacks and his other new quirks, Kevin suspected that better than half of the officers around the station assumed he was recovering from some kind of breakdown or trauma. Kevin might normally have been forced to run the gauntlet of everyone's prying, but having a partner willing to run interference was a godsend. He was never privy to those conversations himself, but so far Javier had managed to provide an almost bulletproof barrier to others' questions and concern, and generally succeeded in reassuring everyone that Kevin was handling things. All things considered, Kevin thought he probably shouldn't have felt safe with that arrangement...yet he did, just the same.

Still, it was probably hard for anyone to believe he really was "handling" it on the days when his worst attacks happened.

The most intense he ever suffered had occurred in an elevator at the station. It had been during another heatwave, this time in June, and the impact of everyone's AC being cranked up had visited a predictable drain on the power grid. Around two in the afternoon the lights had gone out in the station, and the elevator had shuddered to a halt. The elevator hadn't been especially crowded—just himself, Javier, a couple of officers who worked in Traffic, and some woman whose business there Kevin could only guess—but, as the darkness had pressed in on him, Kevin had felt alarmingly confined. It hadn't been anything as simple as claustrophobia—the real problem had been that he was unable to see Javier. Kevin and his partner usually tried to keep an easy foot between them whenever possible anymore—a distance which, on some days, could easily mean the difference between panic and stability.

Suddenly, though, Kevin had found himself trapped in the dark with his partner, unable to measure that distance, and unable to escape.

Between the growing humidity of their spent breaths, the darkness, the closeness, and the heat, in his terror Kevin's mind had begun to drift. Though dimly aware of reality—the elevator, the woman's concern, his partner's voice calmly warning people not to touch him—those details had grown distant, drowned out and replaced by familiar horrors normally confined to Kevin's dreams. Though he later learned that the attack had only lasted a few minutes, for a subjective eternity the darkness surrounding him had been that of warm, damp tunnels packed tightly with other creatures.

Creatures whose limbs searched tirelessly for him in the dark, hungry to _connect_...

When the lights had come back on, Kevin's breathing had been so fast and so ragged that his lungs had still ached nearly an hour afterward. In his panic it seemed he had tucked himself into a corner, facing the wall. He had gone down on his knees, curled in on himself, and his gloved hands had spread to cover the back of his neck.

As if he had been trying to hide every inch of exposed skin that someone else might have touched.

That attack had been by far the worst, though the one he was experiencing now was easily a close second. Normally, on some level, they _did_ happen because of Javier, and Kevin could often predict the days when they would. This one had been completely unexpected, though, and had come upon him entirely without warning. After all, there should have been no reason for him to panic when he knew perfectly well that Javier was somewhere else on the other side of the city. Kevin should have felt safe here. He wasn't alone. He was inside a _church_, and there was nothing about the weather, or the company, or the setting itself that even remotely resembled his nightmares...

He had been rehearsing for his _wedding_, for God's sake.

Jenny had tried to keep him involved in the planning process—ultimately, her word had been law, but she had wanted him interested, at least. Kevin had even tried to be, before—before _other_ things had made those details difficult to focus on or retain. If he had been there when she had discussed the opening sermon with the Father—or if that was a part of the wedding that was normally even arranged—Kevin really couldn't remember. If he had, it had to have been _before_, otherwise he liked to think he would have remembered hearing that particular snatch of scripture being a part of it...

"_Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh._"

Tucked away safely in a bathroom stall, Kevin shuddered.

He hadn't even registered the words consciously at first—his focus had been on Jenny, and his first clue that something was wrong had been the sight of her giddy expression giving way to a frown as worry crept in. It was only then that he had noticed that he was hyperventilating. By the time she interrupted the priest to ask him what was wrong, Kevin's entire body had been shaking. He hadn't been any more able to answer her question then than he was right now, words lost amid the panic that had begun to well up inside him.

And when she had reached out to him Kevin had recoiled from her touch, drawing away in terror.

Everyone assembled for the rehearsal had been staring at him by then, leaving him feeling mercilessly exposed. Kevin had looked to his side for support. But, of course, Javier hadn't been there—Javier had _refused_ to be there—and there had been nothing that Jenny's skinny half-brother could have done to help him. No way for him to even _begin_ to understand—

Javier would have understood in an instant.

That was when Kevin had lit out of the room, finding the bathroom and locking the door behind him so that he could finish his meltdown in relative peace. And Kevin had been there for perhaps seven minutes, sorting frantically through his mind for something on which to anchor his thoughts, when he finally made his decision. Until that moment, Kevin hadn't been consciously aware that the decision needed to be made, but once it had been he knew only a fool could have really believed otherwise. Not that the decision, for all it had been made without his full awareness, had been easy—on the contrary, just thinking about what he had to do was gutting him.

Still, it felt..._right_ to him, just the same.

Kevin opened the door to Jenny's worried face, and before allowing her a single word he drew her into a kiss. He kissed her passionately, desperately, wishing he could tell her through the power of the kiss itself everything he felt for her and have it be understood. He wanted her to know just how much she meant to him, how much he loved her...

And how much it was going to hurt him to let her go.

Because he didn't have any right to ask for Jenny's "for better or worse" when he hadn't told her the truth about what had happened with Javier. He couldn't ask her to accept him "in sickness and in health" when he hadn't told her what it was he carried, and barely understood it himself. Kevin was infected—tainted by the touch of something that was frighteningly inhuman—and he had no right to bring his corruption near her...

And how could he promise her "until death do us part" when—on a terrifying, irrevocable, intimate level—he was already one flesh with _Javier_?

There was still concern in her eyes when they broke from the kiss, Jenny's gaze lingering on his tear-stained face. Kevin set his forehead against hers, closing his eyes to breathe in her scent as he fought for the words he needed to say.

"I love you..." he told her, his voice a rough, broken whisper. "I _love_ you, Jenny, and I'm sorry, I am _so_ sorry, but I can't—"

Kevin nearly choked—though whether it was from the tears straining his throat or from the pain behind his helpless ramble he really couldn't say.

"I can't. I can't do this. I can't go through with this. I can't _do this_ to you—"

"Kevin, what are you talking about?"

Jenny's voice trembled a little, and he squeezed her arm gently as he fought against the urge to take it all back while he still could.

"I—" Kevin's voice froze for a moment, his mind going perilously blank before it finally surrendered the words he needed. "I had an affair."

It was as close to the truth as he could ever sanely give her, and Kevin knew he needed to give her _something_.

"Months ago, Javier and I got into a fight," Kevin said, the words rushing out of him with a broken, urgent desperation. "It was when I asked him to be my best man. We got in a fight, and—and a few nights later, after a bad case, we got drunk and I pushed him to explain and... And he admitted he had feelings for me, Jenn, and we wound up sleeping together."

Jenny had pulled out of his arms by then, shaking her head as if she didn't believe him, but there were tears running down her face.

"God, it almost killed me, Jenn, what I did," he said. "_Literally_, it almost killed me. I couldn't— I could barely live with it, and I was killing myself by inches. Javier _saw_, and he...he tried to help me work through it, and..."

And though the words themselves were a lie, the pain that scoured his voice raw was _very_ real. As he spoke, it all sounded so plausible that Kevin almost wished _he_ could believe it. He wished so badly that he really could believe that a drunken affair had driven him into some guilt-induced breakdown—believe that his dreams of alien worlds and bloodied sands really were just _dreams_, and anything hinting otherwise some kind of bizarre delusion...

Kevin swallowed and took a deep, shaking breath before he made himself meet her eyes again.

"And what happened between us wasn't something either Javier or I can ever take back," Kevin finished, wearily.

The words fell heavily off his tongue, feeling like the truest Kevin had ever spoken.

Because Jenny loved him, and Kevin loved her back just as fiercely, but she would never _need_ him the way that Javier did. She would move on after this. She would find someone else, and one day she would forget about Kevin entirely. It hurt for him to imagine that, but Kevin knew that it was true. The same could not be said of his partner. Kevin knew that he was important to Javier in ways that were difficult to comprehend, let alone articulate or measure. He knew that his partner might never find anyone else who could ever be for him what Kevin held the potential to be. Kevin also knew that, if he turned his back on Javier, his partner would never survive it—and knew it just as intimately as he would had those feelings been his own.

And Kevin also couldn't deny that _he_ needed Javier as well.

Even if Kevin had bound himself to Jenny in the only way he could, it wouldn't have changed anything. It couldn't have stopped the strange _hive-hunger_ he felt for his partner from slowly wearing him down. That inhuman draw—that _need—_had been with him ever since the elements Javier had planted inside of him had finished maturing. Faint at first, over time it had uncurled slowly, becoming sharper and more insistent. That hunger, Kevin acknowledged to himself, had weighed heavily in his decision. One day, it would become too powerful for him to resist. Once that happened, Kevin knew, his promises to Jenny would be all but meaningless.

One day, he would no longer even have the strength to be afraid of it.

Still, if that hunger had been his only reason—if there had been only that alien force for him to consider—Kevin might still have clung stubbornly to the life he had lost, determined to outlast it for as long as he could. But...there had been other feelings for his partner, early on in their working together. Feelings, he now forced himself to acknowledge, that he had suppressed and ignored—and all but forgotten in the name of fears which, now, seemed so stupid and impossibly petty. Now, more than anything, Kevin felt like an idiot to have turned his back on them—to have denied feelings that had been so very _human_.

And it was the humanity of those feelings that Kevin had held on to in making his decision, because they were one of the very few parts of himself he knew for sure he could really trust—could know for certain had truly come from _him_. Right now few things—not his family's approval, or the respect of his peers, or even his hope for salvation—mattered more to him than that.

Still, hours later—after the church had been emptied, and Jenny taken home by her mother—when Kevin found himself waiting on Javier's doorstep, he felt like he was risking his soul just by being there.

Javier looked a little stunned when he opened the door to see him. Kevin took a small amount of comfort in that expression, as if the conclusion hadn't truly been as foregone as it had felt. When his partner didn't speak Kevin stepped forward, bringing them both into the apartment, and Kevin heard the door swing shut behind them as he took Javier's face in his hands.

The leather of the gloves was thin, and Kevin could almost feel the warmth of the skin beneath it as he touched his partner's cheek. Javier closed his eyes as he leaned into Kevin's touch, a line creasing his forehead at the whisper of leather across his skin and the tease Kevin knew it represented. Kevin moved his hand, smoothing a thumb briefly over that faint line on his partner's brow before resting his head against the back of his gloved hand. Kevin closed his own eyes—it was the closest he and his partner had been in more than four months—and let out a shaking sigh. He felt Javier tense just slightly when the breath tickled his lips.

"I want you," Kevin told him softly, his voice a tight, painful whisper. "I should have let you know that a long time ago, before—before _this_."

Kevin opened his eyes and found Javier looking into them. He saw his partner fighting to hide the restless hope Javier never let himself show. Kevin knew he didn't have to clarify what he meant, he never would, but he needed a final reminder for himself. A reminder that there had been _want _and not simply _need_ driving him toward this moment. That was a crucial distinction. Whatever happened after this, Kevin needed to remember the painfully human reasons behind the choice he had made...

And those that still needed making.

"I want you, I _do_," Kevin said shakily, "but after what's happened to me—what you've done—I'm _terrified_, Javi."

He felt like a child just saying it like that, vulnerable and foolish. Javier very obviously didn't see it that way. His partner brought his hand up—slowly, _so_ slowly—to take Kevin's other hand where it still cradled his face. Kevin felt his partner's touch brush lightly across his knuckles, just the faintest ghost of pressure as Javier's fingers slid between his.

"I am too," Javier admitted with a whisper. "I don't think I've ever been more afraid of myself than I was after that night, Kev. I was so scared that I wouldn't be strong enough for you. That I might—"

The words broke off, something dark flickering in his partner's eyes before it too was hidden. Kevin shuddered. He had felt, back in the beginning, how strong his partner's need had been, and he could only imagine it having grown worse since then. It must have been killing Javier to have had Kevin by his side every day and be unable to touch him—to have a part of _himself _so close, and yet be unable to connect. As difficult as it had been for Kevin to ignore his own stirring hunger, for Javier it had to have been _torture_...

Kevin wished he could erase every second he had allowed Javier to hurt like that.

"I _need_ you, Kev," Javier said, hoarsely, and Kevin didn't think he had ever heard a single word given more desperate meaning. "But...never like that. _Never_. I swear I never wanted to take anything from you that you weren't willing to give."

And Kevin made his final decision.

Dropping his hand down to Javier's jaw, Kevin swiped a thumb over his partner's lips. Then, slowly, he brought their mouths together in a tentative, cautious kiss. He felt it almost instantly the moment their lips touched—the first sharp jolt of connection, almost exactly as he recalled it from Javier's memories. It was followed immediately by an odd sensation, like a whisper of pressure as something brushed teasingly across the outside of his awareness. For a precarious moment there was nothing more, then a kind of exchange—like the answering of an unspoken question—before Kevin was greeted with a feeling of _recognition_, bone deep, as his body acknowledged a piece of itself that had been missing for far, far too long...

There were already tears in Kevin's eyes when, _finally_, the link opened up between them.

Awareness trickled in, bit by bit, as if his nerves were tapping directly into Javier's. They flowed into each other, drifting into the other's perceptions, becoming one in skin and bone. Kevin felt the echo of his own lips, warm against his partner's, and tasted the dry, metallic flavor of fear-hope-anticipation that sat on Javier's tongue. His heart was already racing, and Javier's pulse was rising rapidly to meet its pace, chased hard by the touch of Kevin's fading fears and by the sharpness of his own arousal.

And all this just from the lightest touch of Javier's lips against his.

Javier let out a broken sound when the kiss ended, and Kevin murmured a wordless apology against his partner's cheek. Because it had only been one brief touch—just a single chaste kiss—but it had already begun to wake to its fullest strength the hunger that had been sleeping inside of him, in _both_ of them, igniting a desperation that pierced deep into his core. Kevin needed...more. The bright satisfaction brought by their joining demanded it. More skin, more contact—more _Javier_. Kevin needed every _piece_ of him.

Overwhelmed by a rush of feeling, Kevin felt Javier echo back to him a need practically indistinguishable from his own.

It was a frantic struggle to shed their clothes, racing to bare skin for the other's touch, two pairs of hands working almost as one to make it happen. Kevin lost one glove to the tug of Javier's teeth while his partner's hands were busily stripping the other. Once his own hands were freed Kevin made quick work in returning the favor by opening his partner's shirt—the buttons he destroyed in the process completely beneath either of their concern.

They pressed in against one another, locked within a frenzied embrace as each fought for a position granting the greatest amount of contact, desperate for the touch of skin on skin. The expanse of Javier's back under his hands was already obscene, and when a knee slid between Kevin's legs he choked on a gasp at the pressure against his already aching cock. He heard Javier swear as his partner felt it as well, his nails biting the skin of Kevin's shoulder.

From there, in spite of their unearthly connection, the hungers driving them turned very human indeed. Javier's desires echoed in Kevin's awareness with such clarity and urgency it would have been impossible to deny him. Fleeting surface touches were too easily broken. Javier needed something more solid, more intimate—_deeper_. The ferocity of that need was such that they very nearly didn't bother reaching the bed. Once there, they likely would have abandoned the thought of adequate preparation had the nightstand not been within easy reach—

Every second they delayed seemed to hurt a thousand times more than any physical pain.

Though their actions were hasty, that didn't mean they weren't careful—it was startlingly easy to be while feeling both sides of every touch. Kevin could feel for himself the gentle burn and stretch as he worked his fingers inside his partner, and, armed with the familiarity Javier had with his own body, he knew just how much his partner could take. He found Javier's prostate almost without searching, and the hot rush of pleasure surged sharply through them both, increasing their desperation. It felt like a lifetime had passed by the time Kevin finally pushed his way inside. He angled every stroke to give Javier exactly what he needed, and Javier pushed back against each thrust to give him the same.

His pleasure, Javier's—there was no distinction anymore. Their nerves were so intertwined it was impossible to know where one of them ended and the other began. Their joining together felt like being completed—as if they had always been meant to exist as two parts of the same organism. It was like Javier had moved inside of him, filling not just the gap left behind when his partner had changed him, but others too that Kevin hadn't even known existed simply because they had _always_ been there...

Yet, even as joy soared through them, Kevin slowly began to notice a bizarre flaw—an error in their connection. Difficult to pinpoint or understand, in his mind Kevin could only conceive of it as a sort of strange emptiness, like a blind spot marring his awareness of his partner's body. There was something very disturbing about it, that small, dead space at the core of everything Javier was. It felt..._wrong_, and brushing against it made Kevin feel faintly nauseous, like he had discovered rot suppurating beneath the surface of his own skin.

Javier was holding something back from him, he realized suddenly, and without even thinking, rather than drawing away, Kevin pushed lightly against it.

There was a faint impression of resistance before that final barrier came down, and for a moment it was almost perfect. For a single brief, yet timeless moment neither one of them existed in any meaningful sense. They had disappeared into each other—lost in an impossibly seamless state. Then there was a strange sensation—a tension and heaviness that began to creep into Javier's body. Distracted by their wholeness within each other, Kevin hardly had time to register the chill shock of his partner's fear, to realize something was _wrong_ before—

_Pain_.

It tore through Javier's body and into his own like an electric current, an overwhelming sensation like needles marching over his skin. A wash of heat followed, like hot metal filling his insides, and pressure rose beneath it, crushing everything else from his awareness until finally, _horribly_, something gave way. And it was Kevin who cried out when he felt his partner's body tear itself apart—

Javier no longer had a throat with which to scream. Javier was gone—he had ceased to exist completely—but at the same time Kevin was not _alone_.

There was no trace of his partner in the thing that remained in Javier's place. There was nothing human in it at all, Kevin was terrified to realize—though it _did_ have a mind, if one could call it that. Kevin could feel the strange patterns of its half-thoughts, rhythmic and almost lulling, though it lacked the level of volition he had felt from Javier. Coiled beneath him, the creature shook off a staticky kind of confusion as it began responding to its surroundings, tasting the air of the room and the sweat growing cold on Kevin's skin.

Its limbs rose up around him as it sought to recover the contact it had lost, the hunger it felt for the connection even more intense and inescapable than Javier's. Sharp hooks raised welts as they scored across Kevin's raw and overstimulated skin, and he felt it respond to his pain by drawing them in—retracting the hooks into soft sheathes within its limbs. The flesh was fever-hot, its surface dark and rough with tiny bumps. It was also dry, though it was gradually growing less so as pores that hadn't existed only moments ago were quickly catching up to the task. And it may have been some component of that fluid, whatever it was, but the room had begun to fill with a sharp odor, sour like vinegar though not quite as harsh—

A scent which cut powerfully through Kevin's awareness, calling forth memories of sand and blood.

The thought helped him break through some of the shock and confusion that had left him all but helpless. For the first time he managed to struggle past the disorienting tumble of formless thoughts and incomprehensible sensations filtering in. More importantly, Kevin finally managed to remember _who_ he was and _what_ he was, separate from the thing his partner had suddenly become.

Having wrestled some freedom for himself within his own mind, Kevin was faced with attempting to do so physically. Testing his range of movement, Kevin quickly found that the limbs twisted around him were monstrously strong, loosening only slightly as he struggled to escape. Not that it was actively holding him prisoner—Kevin didn't even think it was capable of understanding that he wanted free. Or even understanding _want_, as far as that went.

The creature wanted nothing. It meant him no harm. It only knew that Kevin was a part of itself, and that instinct demanded their connection.

Kevin tried not to let that knowledge dull the fear which, at this point, was the only thing keeping him from sinking back into the connection completely. It was a very difficult, very near thing. Cruelly, even without Javier's presence, that same intense feeling of completeness remained. Yet there was something else as well—something he hadn't felt from Javier—another feeling beating faintly against his awareness, light but almost desperate, like a moth fluttering at a window. It was...like a request, only without words or real thought. Subtle, yet frantic, and strangely demanding...

Almost as if the it were begging for something.

The thought came to him all at once, freezing Kevin's breath in his chest. Near-mindless as it was, the creature possessed almost no will of its own, yet having acknowledged him as a part of itself, the possibility existed that Kevin might be able to bend it to _his_. The connection stretching out between them might be his best hope for escape—and perhaps the _only_ hope he had of recovering Javier. The memory was faint, but Kevin knew that when he was ill his partner had said something about that—that it might have been possible, after losing himself, to become _Javier_ again, but that in this form he would be incapable of desiring it...

Kevin _did_ desire it, though. Right now, Kevin desired that more than anything else in the world.

Slowly, carefully, Kevin let himself drift back into the flow of sensation linking him to the creature, immersing himself, with great caution, into the fullness of its perceptions. He could feel the connection solidify between them as he gradually opened himself wide, and grew aware of the faint agitation rising up in response to the new, anxious spin of his thoughts. Kevin's skin still felt flushed and sensitive, seeming almost to burn where the creature's flesh touched his—from the heat of its body, and perhaps from whatever was coating its skin, but also from the prickling, electric rush of the intensifying connection between them.

The sharp sudden strength of it left him dizzy and breathless, and Kevin sagged within the power of the creature's grip. Its coils tightened around him as his weight shifted, one limb slipping around his waist, warm with the frenetic dance of nerves flickering sharply to life wherever one body met the other. Another limb tightened around his thigh, sliding upward as it adjusted its hold. The irregular, pebbled surface of its flesh slid sinuously against Kevin's half-hard cock, and a shiver tore through him at the sensation—both from the bright glow of connection exciting his nerves and the alarming, unexpected pleasure of its textured caress.

His reaction rippled through the creature as well—it felt everything just as sharply as if his nerve-endings were its own. The sensations were as alien to it as anything Kevin himself had experienced, yet while it couldn't quite comprehend exactly what it was feeling, it seemed to understand fear even less. Curiosity would have been far too strong a word for it, but it _did_ seem compelled to examine its environment. Those impulses drove it forward, its coils loosening slowly from around Kevin's leg and drifting upward to explore his body. And when its questing touch elicited another hot thrill of pleasure, one limb curled itself around his cock, tightening slowly with a gentle pressure.

Kevin barely held in a gasp. In spite of everything, on a purely physical level the heat and friction of the alien flesh surrounding him was an incredible sensation, and Kevin realized with a distant horror that his erection had begun to fill once again.

He soon found himself drawn further into the nest of its limbs, coils twining around his legs and arms to support his weight completely, cradling him in an almost liquid warmth. For a moment he was lost as the creature curled around him, drinking in with something that was almost wonder everything it could from a part of itself so _different_ that it was beyond its comprehension—Kevin's own skin, cool and soft and alarmingly responsive; Kevin's thoughts, too sharp and fast to be understood.

Kevin's eyes had slid shut without his notice, and he opened them with a start. He had been turned over on his back to allow the sensitive, searching limbs access to the vulnerable softness of his chest and belly. Others arched over him, throwing shadows across his face in the dim light. One narrow tip slid across his collarbone, snaking upward to press almost delicately at the spot where Kevin's pulse fluttered rapidly in his throat. Another seared against the flushed, hot skin of his cheek as it moved along the side of his face, and when it brushed across the corner of his mouth, Kevin couldn't hold back the startled sound that parted his lips.

The soft breath across its skin drew the creature's interest, its exploration dipping into the warm wetness of Kevin's mouth. It slipped gently past his lips and across his tongue, tasting the sweetness of his saliva, and Kevin grew aware of the odd, sharp, bitter flavor of the fluid coating the creature's skin. The invasion should have made him gag—distantly, Kevin though perhaps that he should bite down. Yet neither of these things happened, and as he found himself abandoning the notion of fighting back in the only way he still could, Kevin realized with a faint, abstract kind of horror that he didn't even want to. That part of him _wanted_ this—this thing that wasn't Javier, yet was, flowing in to fill his empty spaces.

Kevin let out a low sound, hideously muffled, that may have been a sob—

It very likely wasn't.

The heat of the limbs surrounding him had him feeling feverish, his awareness of anything else growing frighteningly indistinct. Warmth, pleasure, and a sense of wholeness bled into him through every inch of flesh that touched, and Kevin felt like he was drowning—melting away in an eddy of shared sensation, even as he tried so desperately to keep his focus clear. He had to remain open if he had any hopes of harnessing the connection to bring his partner back, yet every moment he left himself exposed risked the loss of everything else he had left—of losing whatever still remained of _himself._

Though, suddenly, that didn't seem worth much—not if he couldn't get Javier _back_.

Weighing it that way, Kevin's struggles seemed almost pointless, his hard-won state of half-escape a petty token of rebellion. He had chosen this, after all. He had known—only vaguely, but he had _known—_what he was risking when he had come to Javier. He had been prepared to lose himself, to be torn apart by the tides of something too alien to wholly understand. Kevin had known that, and he had come anyway. And he had been confident of his decisions when he had stepped into Javier's apartment that night...

Now, only one threshold remained for Kevin to cross over.

It was like relaxing a muscle, dropping those final boundaries that lay between himself and the whole of the creature's being. Painful almost, but with a glorious feeling of relief. Awareness of its attentions poured into him until it seemed no separation truly remained. In a surreal way, the creature, with its tangle of searching, tasting, grasping limbs, felt like nothing more than a bizarre, autonomous extension of his own body. Distantly, he knew the thought should have been startling, or even terrifying, but Kevin could feel his capacity for either emotion slowly draining away.

There was no room for horror when the touch exploring his body was his touch—nothing to fear when there was no desire present but his own.

He was lost for a moment to the strange feeling of experiencing his own body through the creature's alien senses. His skin felt cool despite the overstimulated flush he knew was burning there, though he was slowly growing warmer beneath the touch of its limbs, as if the temperature of his flesh were rising to match its own. Closing his eyes, Kevin found that the room was still visible—almost all of it in a near-panorama, stitched together from the overlapping view of every eye-like organ which studded the creature's moving limbs. The image was indistinct, unfocused and lacking in contrast, yet at the same time oddly bright, and the spill of moonlight from the window painted the room in colors that had probably never been named.

A limb slid across the skin of his back—slick with sweat and fluid—and hooks bit lightly at his flesh as they slipped from their sheaths in a desperate attempt to gain purchase. Kevin responded in kind, fingers sinking into the strange, dense flesh of the limb embracing his chest. There was a sensation almost like pain to which the creature rippled a response. Kevin's thumb grazed the edge of a shallow pit in the side of the limb, ticklish with sensitive nerve-endings through which he could taste the sweat and oils on his own skin, complex with the chemicals of fear and arousal.

The tip of one limb slid slowly upward, climbing between Kevin's thighs. Being long past surrender—long past fear, or disgust, or denial of his willing submission—he welcomed its entry, his hands caressing the limbs that encircled his waist as he spread his legs wide. Narrow and slick, the limb slid easily inside of him, pulling itself thin as it worked its way further in, thickening once progress was made. The fluid motion stretched him slowly as it continued, inch by inch. Kevin could feel the textured surface of its flesh moving against his insides, and the hardness of one of the smaller hooks clenched tightly within its sheathe.

Even that reminder—of the danger, of the creature's fierce strength and what it could do to him—wasn't enough to break the spell of sensation. And when the limb twisted just slightly inside of him, that hardness pressing against his prostate, the contact, the heat, and the feeling of fullness made him shiver. Kevin thrust into the heat of the limbs hugging his cock with a hoarse moan, hands gripping desperately at the others surrounding him.

And when he came the creature coiled hungrily around him, cradling him in a soft, rippling warmth as he struggled to catch his breath.

The aftermath was like the calming of the sea. The creature was at rest, or something close to it, humming with some vague, soft, baffled emotion that almost felt like bliss. Kevin's thoughts, meanwhile, slowly crystallized into something more manageable—something closer to human—and he was able to start his search once again.

He had to delve _deep_, sinking into the connection, past thoughts that were not quite thoughts, as he sought desperately for something he could recognize—some sign of Javier inside the alien thing which held him.

Truthfully, Kevin didn't know what he had found once he finally found it. Some densely active cluster of whatever tissues made the connection possible, he thought. Nestled like eggs in the brightly lit nest of activity, Kevin sensed a handful of dull, dense tangles. They felt almost like sensation itself, pulled tight—like a charlie-horse, if the phenomenon could occur in nerves rather than muscle—a tense mass of suspended potential.

Kevin felt something shift physically as he touched them with his awareness—in himself as well as in the creature that surrounded him. And he had only a few bare seconds to brace himself for the wrenching agony of tissues tearing and dissolving, reshaping themselves into something else entirely.

When Javier resurfaced—reappeared, was resurrected—Kevin could feel his heartbeat, racing even more frantically than his own. Javier gripped onto him tightly enough that Kevin knew he would soon be wearing bruises in the shape and pattern of his partner's fingers. His entire body was shaking, and his mind was filled with a kind of frantic static that seemed to be taking far too long to fall into the rhythms Kevin had felt before. As he waited, listening, it stuck Kevin suddenly as a distressing reversal of the circumstances of his own transformation, that, in a way, they each now shared the experience of being destroyed and remade in the other's image...

A sick feeling wormed briefly in Kevin's stomach at the thought, because some part of him that he couldn't identify or name felt that was only right.

Finally, awareness filtered back in, Javier's thoughts realigning into something coherent and readable. Kevin could feel his partner's panic and his confusion, and Kevin knew Javier must feel his concern. Yet, in spite of what had happened—in spite of the horror of the grotesque miracle that had just occurred—there was a cell-deep contentment running through both of them, like a continuous current. Neither of them wanted to break that connection, but there was a trembling fear they each felt keenly, both of them painfully aware that they must to separate—and _soon—_if they hoped to continue to exist as discrete entities from one another.

Kevin didn't know whether or not he should have been surprised when it was Javier who first moved to break them apart.

The pain was nearly physical, and Kevin could almost feel the nerves severing from one another as their nervous systems finally began to detach. It was agony, and the feeling of loss cut deep. Through it all Kevin couldn't help but wonder how, if it had felt like this in the beginning after his change, Javier had ever let him walk out the door.

It took far too long for Kevin to reorient himself. Once he had, he found Javier sitting on the end of the bed. His partner sat with his back to him, head bowed. His breathing was very rapid, but deliberately even. And still, Kevin's first instinct was to reach out to him...

By some previously unknown strength, he didn't.

"Javi...are you..."

Kevin paused, because he wasn't _even_ stupid enough to ask if his partner was okay. But no words he considered seemed to approach their situation by even a mile.

"Are you going to be okay?" he asked finally, knowing perfectly well how inadequate it was, but helplessly in need of something.

Javier didn't respond right away, but after a moment his partner slowly shook his head. It wasn't a no—Kevin was almost certain of that—but an indication that Javier himself was less than sure. Given what had just happened to him—what he was recovering from, _Jesus—_Kevin thought that was more than understandable. As the silence stretched out several minutes more, Kevin thought it had never felt so empty. Eventually, he just couldn't take it any longer.

"We...we have a choice," Kevin asserted, shakily.

Kevin didn't have to explain what he meant, he knew he didn't. They had each lasted this long already without giving in. The drives behind the events of this night were powerful, but they _had_ resisted them before. There was no need for what had happened here to ever happen again...

Still, it sounded hopeless to him even as he said it, ignoring the memory of himself in Javier's place as he did.

_This is where it stops_, Javier had said to him. But Kevin thought they had both known, even then, that it was hopeless, and he knew they both felt that even more strongly now.

Javier let out a faint, pained laugh, and again he shook his head.

"No. No...choice," Javier said, slowly, and without inflection.

Resting his elbows on his knees, Javier scrubbed both hands over his head.

"This...will happen...again," Javier said, a strange, halting slowness dragging at his words, as if he was having difficulty putting them together. "It will."

Finally, with a sigh, he looked over his shoulder at Kevin.

"We're...both going...to _want_ it to."

And Kevin couldn't help himself, he was forced to look away.

Because he _shouldn't_ want it to, not after what had happened tonight. For Kevin, his greatest fear of the bizarre connection that had been forged between himself and his partner had always been the threat that he might lose himself to it completely—that he would be consumed by it, and lose everything that made him who he was. Yet the reality he had just experienced—the _reversal_ of those fears—had been infinitely worse than anything he could possibly have imagined.

Because it had been Javier that had been consumed by it, _destroyed—_

The thought still sickened him, and he wanted to be able to look back on the whole affair as something obscene. But no matter how he tried, he found it impossible to do so. The joy that had sung through his nerves, the feeling of completeness at their joining—there was no forgetting that, and Kevin hated himself for it, just a little. And he knew Javier was right. Sooner or later, it _would_ happen. He wasn't strong enough not to seek that feeling again.

And in spite of what they now knew he risked, Kevin knew that Javier wasn't either.

"Is there anything..."

"Coffee'd be good now," Javier said immediately, leaving Kevin to gape briefly in surprise.

"Coffee," he managed faintly, a little dazed. "Right. I can do that."

And, really, whatever else his partner was, Javier was clearly a genius, because coffee was so blessedly _normal_ that brewing a pot might just be enough to keep Kevin from completely losing his mind.

Kevin recovered his shorts and his shirt and left Javier in the bedroom, entering the kitchen to set about completing his task. In a brief moment of near-hysterical humor, it struck him that he had pretty much known where everything was, even before his change. Now, though, the layout of Javier's apartment was just as familiar to him as his own. And while Kevin had already known that Javier favored the black mug with the chip in the handle, he had never known that the reason his partner cherished it was that it was the last one he owned that had belonged to the real Javier.

That drinking from it gave him an odd, comforting sense of continuity...

Kevin would never have something like that, he realized. There was no single moment that he could use to delineate himself. The process that had brought him to this moment had begun the night of his partner's drunken confession, and had still been incomplete days later when his illness had finally ended. He had no way of knowing if it was complete even _now_, and neither one of them knew just how much he had changed, or how much he might change still. And there was no way of knowing how much of who and what he had been before remained, and how much had been altered or...replaced. If there ever came a time when he, like Javier, could no longer be considered truly human at all—when he was no longer even truly Kevin Ryan—he might never even know it.

If that moment hadn't come and passed unmarked already.

Javier would have felt a similar familiarity in Kevin's own apartment, he knew, though Kevin also now knew it would not have run as deep. Kevin held a strange, vague sense now of what his partner had gained from him, both during this joining and before—like odd, muffled echoes of his own memories. But, where Kevin's knowledge of Javier ran far back into those first moments of his new conscious life, in reverse that window was much smaller. It began with just a few, hazy snatches of the half-conscious, dream-like confusion of his illness when the connection had first opened up between them. Kevin's life before that moment was a complete blank to his partner—or, at least as much so as it had been before his change—as if those memories were completely inaccessible.

It was...comforting to know that he had that much privacy, at least. Yet, oddly, at the same time it stung just a little for reasons he couldn't quite define.

By contrast, Kevin _did_ have a handful of Javier's oldest memories—those which had belonged to the real Javier—though they were even more muted and incomplete than the others that Kevin possessed. Though it was hopeless speculation, it seemed possible that the two sets of memories—those that were completely human, and those that were...not—might have been encoded in very different biological languages from one another. After all, the contents of a human brain had never been designed to be shared, while the other...

Javier entered the room, thankfully interrupting the frantic run of Kevin's thoughts.

Clad in a pair of pajama bottoms, Javier quietly took a seat at the table, his expression completely unreadable. There was something oddly frozen and erratic about the movements of his partner's face. Just subtly _off_ in a way Kevin would have been hard pressed to name. Combined with the earlier strange, impaired cadence of Javier's words, it was enough to give him chills.

Several silent moments passed as the coffee brewed and Kevin brought their mugs to the table. Javier slid his hands around the mug as if hungry for the warmth, but made no move to drink it.

"Why—" Kevin began, but stopped himself suddenly, unsure, really, what he was supposed to say. "This didn't happen to you before."

Because, delirious or not, Kevin was pretty sure he would have noticed sharing a bed with—

"Maybe...you weren't...finished yet," Javier said. "Maybe."

Javier snorted softly.

"Maybe...because we didn't have sex before," he said then, slowly, like dragging out the words took an extreme effort. "Maybe it was...too much."

Kevin stared at him blankly.

"You don't really think that's why it happened," Kevin said after a moment.

And when Javier shrugged, though his expression was still off and _wrong_, Kevin realized rather suddenly that his partner was joking. That he had tried to crack a _joke_ about this, and...Kevin wasn't sure how he was supposed to feel about that. That he knew how he did feel about it—a feeling that he almost recognized as _relief—_left him wondering if he wasn't better off.

"Jesus, Javi..." Kevin stopped himself, shaking his head. "What... What do we do now?"

Javier sat for a moment, silent, and when he spoke it was with utter certainty.

"We take care of each other," Javier said. "We watch each other's backs. Like always. We...just have to be careful with this. Learn where the limits are."

That the weird, halting rhythm was beginning to disappear from Javier's speech—_finally_—was another relief to Kevin, who had begun to worry about lasting damage. And his partner's rationale was sound. Yet an inane voice in Kevin's mind spoke up that had him laughing softly.

"Shit," Kevin swore, softly. "You turn into some kind of tentacled..._thing_, and the best you can come up with is that we should take this slow? That's so..."

It was absurd, among so many other things, but that wasn't what Kevin wound up saying.

"Us," Kevin said quietly, shaking his head once again, disarmed to find his heart so surprisingly light. "God, that is just so _us_."

Because it _was_, it really was, and in spite of the horror that had lead them up to it, somehow their situation didn't seem nearly as dire as Kevin might have expected. It was as if they had walked through a fire together and come out—singed, but _whole_ on the other side. If they could do that once, then they could do it again, and be reassured of their success so long as they had each other. And though the connection between them was broken—for now—when Kevin looked over at his partner, he knew with an inescapable certainty that Javier felt the same.

For the first time since their strange ordeal, his partner managed a real facial expression—understanding, fond, and familiarly, warmly human.

"I love you too, Kev," Javier told him, and though his smirk was close enough to sarcastic for Kevin to recognize, the feeling in his voice was nakedly sincere.

And, oddly, there was little else either one of them needed to say.


End file.
